Apple’s initial macOS Mojave Marzipan apps are ugly ducklings

“I haven’t been running Mojave on my machine in the beta period. I always wait for public releases before updating the software on my (only) Mac. I knew what to expect of course,” Benjamin Mayo writes for 9to5Mac. “I don’t have my head in the sand. I watched the WWDC keynote, I saw all my friends’ complaints on Twitter, I was braced for it. But, man, these [initial Marzipan apps] suck.”

“Marzipan apps are ugly ducklings. As soon as you use them, you can just know these are not at one with the system. You detect that there’s a translation layer of some kind at work here, just like when you use Slack on the Mac you instinctively feel that it’s a web app in a thin wrapper,” Mayo writes. “The underlying implementation is exposed to the user with a bevy of performance sluggishness, UI quirks and non-standard behaviours. That’s bad.”

“Their fabric is so clearly of another world,” Mayo writes. “I don’t expect the solution Apple ships next year to have the same laundry list of drawbacks that these Mojave apps do. It’s a critique of the apps that are shipping now to customers of macOS. These apps are preinstalled with the OS. News was even unceremoniously placed into the middle of my Dock upon upgrading. And they are not good, simple as that. I would have been mildly happier if Apple had offered these apps as optional App Store downloads affixed with a beta label.”

MacDailyNews Take: We’re confused as to how these apps passed muster at Apple. Aren’t these supposed to be more than proof-of-concept apps, meant to entice developers to do the same (hopefully, better) with their apps? Maybe Apple is just setting the bar really low at first to make other developers look good? That’s not the greatest strategy, either. Why make yourself look sloppy? (We’ve had more than enough of that in recent years, thanks.) Why not give everyone something insanely great to shoot for?

Hopefully, these rocky beginnings will quickly smooth out and iOS apps ported to macOS will begin to feel natural and work as if they were made for the Mac.

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Exactly. Apple News on the Mac looks ridiculous. I’m a voracious Apple News user on my iPhone and was very hopeful that the Mac version would knock it out of the park. Sadly, it is a total whiff from Apple. I *really* should expect results like this with Pipeline at the helm. He has no care or concern about quality. And it shows. Over and over.

If all it takes to look sloppy is to have one whiny poster complain that they don’t like how Apple did something, nothing will ever be good, because people are like lemmings, they see someone moan and whine, and jump on the band wagon.. And the agony… The Icon wound up in the middle of the dock..

Considering that this will be the PRIMARY way you’ll even see a Mac version of a release, ugly is to be expected. Just another thing that indicates Apple’s putting all of their eggs in the iOS basket and just providing an easy way for folks to offer a pale imitation of a Mac app.